The double booking of the Telstra Dome is a joke

MC - in today's "Age" Michael Lynch has done a piece that supports your comments (which, btw, I do agree with) about the AFC CL being the real prize, with the GF being of secondary concern. Yes, BB comes from 'just up the road' -- Smithton, Tas. (local pron. 'Mifton'). Funnily enough, so does Saul Eslake! Not NMFC's favourite person at the moment. A good example of how to lose your bank a cool 6m with a loose tongue! He must have a much more pernicious strain of Vidmaritis. Redb - well, if Dave's post under "HAL GF is a cause for celebration", then I stand corrected. Looks like it could sell out, which is good given ver. 4 has been a less than inspiring season. Roll on another MV championship and another Hawks premiership!!!

RfromL - remember that both Ben Buckley and Andrew Demetriou are North Melbourne 'old boys'. There's so much in common!! Keeper11 - hear the sound of violins.....

RFL, I think the leadup to the HAL GF will be well attended and get good coverage. I was just refuting your conspiracy theory and I guess adding some weight of significance to the Rich V Coll game to illustrate that it is a bigger deal than folks outside of Melbourne realise and I don't barrack for either team. It was definitely still the right decision to move the NAB Cup game, just not as straight forward as some diehard futbol fans rant on about. Redb

RFL, Optus or Princes Park would be way too small for the Rich v Coll game - that's the point. Keeper11, Has anyone ever accused you of putting words in people's mouths? :-) Do you feel better? :lol: You know what happens when you assume...... Your barking up the wrong tree, I like Victory and have been to 3 games. I'm not obsessed however and will happily admit to bandwagoning behaviour when it comes to futbol. Redb

Anyway, I think you should be grateful the game has clear air on Saturday night in Melbourne, if the MCG was available the AFL could have rescheduled the Richmond V Collingwood game at the MCG and got 60,000 and then you would have seen the HAL GF really starved of media oxygen. Besides whether the NAB game was played before or after the HAL GF it would have attracted huge media interest in Melbourne. people talk here as if 'tha media' is actually free, independant, fair and balanced in this country... so if there was no 'real footy' ..yawn ..played before the HAL GF.. ... i assume you're saying the Herald Hun...sorry 'Sun' would have a front page and 6 page coverage /buildup on the melbourne club side hosting a grand final. a national competiton .... and MEL radio would supposedly get behind the club..if not the event as well.. you're either deluded or joking but either way you can't be serious..... australian commercial media ..with news-limited at the forefront ..is nothing more than the marketing/ commercial/ promotional arm of the AFL/ NRL and whose sole aim is market protection of those two codes. sockah is seen as a rival ..a 'foreign threat' and is to be treated as such.... very simple really.....

Not at all, MC. I believe the AFL has played an incredibly smart and savvy game. How much haggling went on between BB and AD beforehand I can only speculate. It would be equally absurd to think just because BB went over to the FFA they no longer communicate. Business might be business, but in the small Oz sports industry there will always be socialising, contact and points of agreement between the major players. As opposed to many in the blogging community with their rigidly drawn lines of difference and ongoing and futile debate as to which code is best. Footy forums around the country (eg. HS) have been littered with gloating HAL fans, and AFL fans and columnists complaining the AFL has been hard done by and at the same time has given into the FFA, etc. etc. They've all missed what has been a great victory to the AFL. And the FFA is to a point indebted to the AFL. AND EVERYBODY STILL HATES TELSTRA DOME (did not Etihad's marketing team realise the degree of resentment toward TD before doing a deal?) RedB -- "the AFL could have rescheduled the Richmond V Collingwood game at the MCG" - purely hypothetical given the cricket pitch. Could they have gone for OO/PP or whatever it's called now? I agree a MV vs. QR GF would have been a more enticing proposition. There's been a lot of talk about a sellout / 50k+ crowd for the HAL GF. I am yet to be convinced. With the Rich v. Coll. game on Thursday night and a MV vs. AU matchup, the HAL GDF will find it even harder to break into the headlines. It'll be nothing like the leadup to the 2006/07 GF. However, I tend to think the FFA is partly to blame for all of this. Because of FIFA dates it pushed back the GF by a couple of weekends. If it had had the creativity to move a couple of rounds to mid-week instead of weekends, this mess could have been avoided. Surely it must've seen the risk of competing with NRL and AFL pre-season comps.

RformL - you read too much into it. Remember, the AFL has Docklands booked already on Friday night and Sunday night. The MCG is unavailable - and the whole context of the NAB cup is that if you keep winning then you get to play the big venues, and maximise your drawing power to get those people turning up to sign up their memberships before the season proper. That only left either Thursday or Monday night - and even a NAB match runs too late to play on a MOnday night - - people don't like those late nights early in the week - - come Thursday though, and you've only got Friday to negotiate and then it's the weekend. Will AFL people be distracted??? Maaate. The footy's about to start, get that soccer out of the way as soon as possible, heck, we all know that soccer folk are satisfied now that they know the 2 teams to take on the ACL. AU probably cared more about winning last week over Roar than they do this week.

RFL, Firstly, Richmond fans in particular with no interest in soccer would not care less abou the HAL GF any more than the NBL GF. They would see the NAB Cup game as far more important not just equal. It's all relative isn't it. However, most sports fans can see the difference and none above have argued there was equality, the facts are TD double booked the date. Another fact, there is considerable interest in this NAB Cup game, far more than usual. The crowd will be large, not as large as the HAL GF, but 40,000+. For a pre-season AFL game this is extraordinary. IMO Thursday night is a tough night to go to a game for a family with kids, this will reduce the potential crowd and I'm sure AD would not have liked that. Anyway, I think you should be grateful the game has clear air on Saturday night in Melbourne, if the MCG was available the AFL could have rescheduled the Richmond V Collingwood game at the MCG and got 60,000 and then you would have seen the HAL GF really starved of media oxygen. Besides whether the NAB game was played before or after the HAL GF it would have attracted huge media interest in Melbourne. I have to say i would have preferred QLD Roar to make the GF, a replay with Adelaide is not exactly raising my interest. An unknown quantity in the QLD Roar as a genuine threat (not saying AU wont win) would have been more media friendly in the first place. Redb

HA HA ... this has got to be the most hilarious 'issue' for sometime. And here's why .... 1. Arguing that an NAB Cup fixture is of equal value to a Grand Final in any sport is absurd. Here's one NAB shareholder who would rather the NAB disassociated itself with the cruddy pre-season cup and put it's capital to better use! Any organisatyion running it's GF would be crazy not to claim first rights. 2. The double-booking is symptomatic of a deeper problem that has been neglected as part of this debate: lack of venues. A new rectangular stadium will alleviate this congestion. Can't argue against that. 3. EVERYBODY HAS UNDERESTIMATED ANDREW DEMETRIOU AND THE AFL! WHY? He has quite smartly traded off a glorified practice match for two key outcomes: 3.1. Image. The AFL has come to a gentleman's agreement and withdrawn it's hand from bullying the FFA into a backdown. 3.2. HERE'S THE KILLER PUNCH: The practice match will be played BEFORE the HAL GF. Now, just what do you suppose the Melbourne media will be churning out all of Friday and into Saturday? Stories about not only Ben Cousins but also The Woods. Two of the biggest AFL stories that have done the rounds in recent times. Perhaps by design the AFL will definitely be depriving the HAL GF of much needed publicity - the oxygen of any sport. Andrew D, I salute you! The AFL isn't the predominant sporting code in this country for no reason. So what appears to be a victory to the FFA and HAL is in fact a hollow victory. And the AFL has employed 2 football concepts your average AFL fan whinges and moans about incessantly:: 1. The sucker punch 2. The strategic value of a draw. Quite ironic.

"The Victory are well liked across the broad sporting spectrum in Melbourne. But and it’s a big but, only when they are winning. This is the nature of sports worship these days, the swing voters. Next year if Victory are out of the finals the support will be back to core in a flash and it’s media ‘win’ will be long forgotten." Considering the Victory have won 3 out of 7 (very likely to be 4 out of 8 in a weeks time) pieces of A-League silverware, more than any other club (1 apiece to Adelaide, Central Coast, Newcastle and Sydney), the time when they aren't winning seem to be rare. Even when they didn't make the finals in 2007-08, their average crowd was in excess of 26k.

Redb " There are some, particularly News Ltd in Sydney who will readily seize on a negative AFL story and milk it dry, whilst the positive stories about football go un-noticed. eg: no reporting of the Bushfire appeal game - I was interstate leading up to the game and there no articles in the Daily Terror or Courier Mail about the Vic Bushfire appeal game!! " gee l hope you're not complaining about lack of media...something about pot and kettle... :)

Michael C . I can only make judgements on what i see and read. I have no reason to doubt you or Redb. Even if you classify me as a critic the perception left was poor. I met Demetriou when he was up in Western Sydney. He is knowledgeable confident and gave me the impression he does not suffer fools gladly. However he does seem to want to dominate , to if you like consume all the oxygen . He would have been far better to leave this to his operations manager. His publc utterances and participation in public was unnecessary. Buckley left the running to others only participating in private dialogue. On another note I would commend the AFL for its strong support of bushfire victims with an honourable mention to the NRL followed by the FFA. To my disappointment one code is missing.

Redb & Westy- and the AFL couldn't just jump without consultation with the stakeholders, both clubs, and channel 10 - their broadcast partners. It's funny isn't it. For some, they like to portray the AFL as a dictatorship. When the proof that they aren't is obvious, i.e. that the AFL first had to sit down with it's stakeholders and the other parties and come to an arrangement - - well, then people find some other reason to pot the AFL. they must be card carrying members of the 'opposition'. And Sydney folk take a swipe at Victorians for being insular!!!

Westy, I never suggested it was a Melbourne only view. There are some, particularly News Ltd in Sydney who will readily seize on a negative AFL story and milk it dry, whilst the positive stories about football go un-noticed. eg: no reporting of the Bushfire appeal game - I was interstate leading up to the game and there no articles in the Daily Terror or Courier Mail about the Vic Bushfire appeal game!! 'The Australian' newspaper (news ltd) did not carry any pre or post reports of the Vic bushfire game, not one, and this from a supposedly national paper. We all know it is Sydney centric. The AFL gets thing wrong , of course it does, but as I said further up - " the only reason the AFL hesitated was the nature of NAB clash, two big Melbourne clubs (both won last week) and the Cousins comeback which has captured the imagination of Richmond fans. I think the AFL would have moved a lot quicker had the matchup not been seen as a pre-season game of unusually high interest. " Now perhaps interstate there is a lack of understanding of how big this game is, pre season or not. It has legs, a Thursday night will potentially rob it of a 45,000 plus crowd. The real culprit is Telstra Dome. Redb

Bruce - has anyone ever mentioned you've got a great name for an award?......yep, at uni were gave out the annual 'Bruce' award!!! actually, I'm a generation younger than your goodself, but, I knew someone who got the truth now and then, and I encountered the odd edition in the newspaper stack ready for the rubbish (no, not the incinerator, but, for others of that era perhaps). I lived out of town and envied those able to buy the Sporting Globe, or the like by just walking down to the newsagency.....back before the internet and the like - back in the days of sports info on the telephone, back then, the Sporting Globe, the Truth etc were all sources of an 'other' viewpoint, or, an 'other' photograph.

Redb please do not insult our inteiiligence the Herald Sun for all its tabloid nature is a strong AFL advocate. You seem to put things in black and white when I accurately reported the channel 10 sports reporter an exAFL player used words like victory for soccer, a retreat by the AFl and a backdown. My point is and was simple the net result at least interstate was negative for the AFL. This was needless. I have great respect for the management acumen of AFL and its clubs in general. In brisbane it choked of the good news leakage about the Gold Coast major sponsor and was reported as aretreat in Adelaide Sydney and Sydney in News LTD and non News LImited papers and across FTA TV stations. I readily agree not worth the trouble but as the AFL learned to its detriment it is a relatively quiet time and as such this gave it even more legs. It was poorly managed and to be honest the whole Dome affair has not been a bright spot for the AFL to let its clubs get ripped of by its own creation is one of its few mistakes. Do not assume others do not acknowledge the AFL is the best run sport in Australia but just as we criticise league ,rugby or football the AFL is not sacrosanct. The story ran on a much wider basis than the HS. A national code should have realised this and acted appropriately. I repeat it was a no brainer. You even had reports of the barbarians inside the citadel. Not true and far fetched but all oxygen to football in Melbourne. Remember the AFL gets national coverage it is no longer restricted to Melbourne centric media outlets. This was purely a Melbourne stoty but used on a national basis. What were they thinking?

Michael C - you must be nearly as old as I am to remember the Struth. Nags, footy (Captain Blood's column was a must-read every week), letters from and about bodice-rippers, and the odd yarn up the front about priests getting caught buggering boys behind the bike-shed. They used to write the headline first, then make the pictures and the story fit the space left over. Newspapers aren't what they used to be!

Millster - agreed re Shield matches at MCG - - far more suited to a ground with a grassy embankment and a few shade trees. the bigger issue is more about just how the BushFire concert booking is permitted given that the protection of the cricket booking. I guess it's incumbant upon Cricket Victoria to be gracious.

Millster, I get most of my news online except on weekend when its the Age or Fin Review, but we have HS copies in the office and I always check out the sports section. :-) Redb

MC - the question 'whats going on' should be applied back at you for suggesting that anything to do with the Sheffield Shield is a 'bigger issue'... apart from to the 20 or 30 mums and dads of the players who will make up 90% of the audience of course. Why on earth is this game being played at the MCG in the first place? What a waste of a venue when a local oval and a few deckchairs would suffice.